Eric Lauga is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique (France) in 1998 and the Corps des Mines Program from Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2001. After receiving an M.S. in Fluid Mechanics from University of Paris Pierre et Marie Curie (France) in 2001, he earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 2005 where he worked in theoretical modeling of flow phenomena at the micron scale. Prior to joining Cambridge, he was on the faculty at MIT (Mathematics) and at the University of California, San Diego (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering). He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2008) and of three awards from the American Physical Society: the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics (2006), the François Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics (2015) and the Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research (2018). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His research interests include the development of theoretical approaches to model viscous flows, in particular in a biological context, the dynamics of complex fluids and interdisciplinary problems in soft matter physics. He joined PRFluids as an Associate Editor in 2016, and he is now co-Chief Editor.
Biological flows inside cells
Biology is dominated by transport problems involving fluid flows, from the transport of nutrients and locomotion to flows around plants and the circulatory system of animals. In this talk, I will discuss three instances of flows arising inside living cells. First I will present our work modelling natural cytoplasmic streaming in Drosophila embryo, an elongated multi-nucleated cell that is a classical model system for eukaryotic development and morphogenesis (https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2023.0428). I will next discuss our work on artificial cytoplasmic streaming, rationalising recent experiments that generate artificially induced intracellular flows using focused light localised inside individual cells (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.8.034202). Finally, I will present work in progress addressing the controversial issue of natural convection flows inside cells arising from small temperature differences, and their impact on intracellular material transport.
25 January 2024, 15h3016h30
M6 Building, Cité Scientifique, Villeneuve d'Ascq (also accessible by zoom - please contact F. Romano for the link)
